How To Connect External Hard Drive to a Mac?

If you connect an external hard drive to a Mac, you won’t be able to view the contents of it. Very first time when I connected an external Hard Drive to my new Mac, nothing came up and for a while and I got worried, that will it ever show up. Though I was able to connect a external USB drive very easily it showed up in the Finder but case isn’t the same with External HDD.

Later I figured out the steps that needs to be done to make external Hard Drive visible on your Mac. Same steps can be followed to show the Mac’s inbuilt Hard Drive on Desktop.

Go to Finder and then from the Finder’s Menu , Click Preferences.

Now on ‘General‘ Tab , Select the Checkbox under the title ‘Show these items on the desktop.

Hard Disk – To show Mac Inbuilt Hard Drive on Desktop

External Disks – To show external hard drive

Now when you go to your Mac’s Desktop, you will see 2 new icons , 1 for your Macintosh HD and another one for the external Hard Drive (if it’s connected).